Let`s Get Small, Says Social-policy Guru Charles Murray

December 11, 1988|By Reviewed by Clarence Page, a member of The Tribune`s editorial board.

In Pursuit of Happiness and Good Government

By Charles Murray

Simon and Schuster, 341 pages, $19.95

Departing from the spirit of Will Rogers, who said he never met a man he didn`t like, it appears that Charles Murray has never met a government social program that he does.

When the Washington Monthly earlier this year asked Murray to name one that works, he couldn`t. When I once asked him in an interview what he thought would be the best way to reform welfare programs, he recommended their abolition.

Not that Murray, currently a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a prominent conservative think tank, wishes to emulate Scrooge. He merely thinks government action in the antipoverty arena has done more harm to the poor than good.

That sort of thinking made Murray`s ``Losing Ground,`` his statistical assault on war-on-poverty programs, one of the most argued documents of the Reagan years. His new book, ``In Pursuit of Happiness and Good Government,``

offers fewer statistics and more ruminations, as Murray fleshes out his prescription for our social ills: less big government, more ``little platoons.``

First, Murray asks us to rethink the central purpose of government. It is, he asserts, the pursuit of happiness, since only life and liberty were awarded as much prominence in the Declaration of Independence.

And what is happiness? Basing his thinking on the 45-year-old motivational theories of Abraham Maslow, Murray argues that the road to happiness winds through a heirarchy of human needs: material resources, safety, self-respect and enjoyment.

When left to amass their own resources, Murray says, even the poorest of the poor, find ways to pursue happiness and lay the groundwork for their children to pursue greater happiness-through what Edmund Burke called ``little platoons`` of individuals ``voluntarily doing important things together,``

whether in a Third World village or an American big-city neighborhood. So, instead of ``social engineering,`` we should think in terms of nurturing the organic goodness we humans tend to cultivate naturally.

Using Maslow, Murray shows how people pursue happiness through their little platoons, utilizing their material resources and establishing norms for safety, self-respect and enjoyment. The little platoons do this so much better than big government, Murray asserts, that the best government can do to further the pursuit of happiness is to protect the little platoons and to make sure they work, mainly by getting out of their way.

Government can help people pursue happiness, Murray asserts, but it cannot guarantee they will achieve it. ``People pursue happiness,`` Murray writes. ``Government cannot.``

Many of us have seen Murray`s little platoons at work-when, for example, parents have been allowed to run their own schools or tenants their own public housing developments. And when low-income, socially alienated people are given power to match such responsibilities, they usually do a more efficient, more satisfying job than government managers who have less of a direct interest in the end results-including the need to build self-esteem and self-actualization.

But if this is a book to delight conservatives and outrage liberals, those who are somewhere in-between and searching for answers may get the nagging feeling, as I did, that something important is missing.

For example, Murray builds a powerful case for the proposition that each of us is responsible for his or her own success or failure, and that government aid, by its very nature, is more of a hindrance than a help. But he ignores the abundance of research that shows that the ability of some people and their platoons to make out better than others do is profundly effected by other factors: class differences, racial and gender prejudice and structural changes in the economy, to name a few.

Murray quotes tellingly from Lao Tzu: ``Governing a large state is like boiling a small fish.`` The challenge for government social policy is to help the most people while doing the least harm. Like boiling a small fish, it is a delicate proposition if you don`t want everything to fall apart.

Assuring us that his vision of little platoons is appropriate for the complex postindustrial society of urban America, ``In Pursuit`` offers us little more than Murray`s eloquently stated, firmly held convictions. That`s enough to make a compelling case, not a convincing one.